Buckwheat

Roger and Anthony are still in the pleasant housing project of neat brick duplexes in Newport, Tennessee, where I found them a year ago. They share a two-room apartment. Anthony has one room, and Roger shares the other with a sunny young woman named Trista, whom he met since my last visit. Trista had three young daughters when she met Roger; they’ve since had a fourth together, Shikara. The children live nearby, with Trista’s mother. During the weekend I spent in Newport, she was always about to bring them over, but it never quite happened.

Other than the addition of Trista to the household, the lives of Roger and Anthony look about the same as they did a year ago—long days hanging around the apartment in a fog of Bronco menthol-cigarette smoke. A lot of their story was told by the documents in Anthony’s manila folder. In January, a letter from the Newport Housing Authority informed him that eighty-five dollars was past due: fifty in rent and thirty-five in various charges. “If we have to evict you,” the letter said, “you may be liable for two hundred dollars in court costs.” Then another letter came from the Housing Authority, saying, “Katrina victims were to have received an initial payment of $2,000 each from FEMA to pay for housing, etc. As far as I know the Newport Housing Authority did not receive any of these funds.” The letter said that the brothers owed a total of $1,025.06, and ordered them to be out of the apartment by February 19th. By making small payments, Roger and Anthony were able to avoid eviction.

Part of the the Housing Authority’s problem with the Wells brothers seems to stem from what Roger describes as a mistake that Anthony made last year: he got a job. Anthony went to work at Wal-Mart. He had to walk two miles each way, because the brothers had no car then and Newport has no buses. First, Wal-Mart put him in the garden department, which he liked. “How are you today, Ma’am, and what would you like to plant?” Anthony said, pursing his lips, in a caricature of a white person speaking. He was soon moved to the warehouse, which was hard for a fifty-six-year-old man. Worse, his twenty-something white foreman insisted on calling him Buckwheat. It’s been a long time since a white man in New Orleans tried calling a black man Buckwheat. “Here it’s like going back in time,” Anthony told me. “The white people think everything is theirs, and the blacks got to get what they give ’em. You go to a fast-food joint, it’s like they don’t see you. The only reason we’re not sitting in the back of the bus is because they got no buses.”

Once Anthony got his seven-something-an-hour job, the rent on their apartment shot up, from fifty dollars to three hundred ninety-seven dollars a month, so more than forty hours of every month’s work went just to paying the increase. Anthony lasted six months, then argued with the store’s assistant manager and was fired. Anthony appealed to the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development for unemployment benefits. A week before I arrived, the Labor Department’s tribunal wrote to say that they’d found no evidence he’d been insubordinate and that his boss hadn’t addressed the racial slurs he’d endured. Anthony said that he expects to receive a hundred twenty-seven dollars a week for thirteen weeks, with the possibility of an extension for another thirteen weeks.

Around the time that Anthony got the news from the tribunal, a letter from the U.S. Department of Education arrived, claiming that he owed the government $12,354.30. In 1986, Anthony enrolled in a security and private-investigator class with a trade school on Canal Street, in New Orleans. As part of a federally funded job-training program, the school applied for, and apparently received, a forty-eight-hundred-dollar Education Department grant to cover Anthony’s tuition. As Anthony tells it, he went to class for about six weeks, three times a week, until one day he showed up and the school was gone. The whole thing was a scam, he said, and now the government wants its money back from him, along with about seventy-five hundred dollars in interest, penalties, and other costs. I asked whether Anthony hadn’t just stopped going to class, and this was the result. “No, man!” he said. “We was about to get taken for target practice, and then we was going to get our little badge and gun and shit!”

We were sitting around on Saturday. Trista had just plugged in a little crockpot full of potpourri, and soon the aroma of lavender and wild cherry was competing with the menthol-tobacco smoke. The mail arrived, and Roger lit up when he found an envelope from FEMA. But, as he read the letter, his face knotted like a cinnamon roll. He tossed it at me: “During our audit a review of your case showed that you were not eligible for some or all of the funds that FEMA provided to you,” it said. FEMA was now demanding that Roger send back the two thousand dollars in emergency help he’d received soon after the storm, because the address he’d put down in New Orleans was not, FEMA said, his primary home. The letter invited Roger to send the money in right away to avoid interest and penalties. “Please note,” it continued, “that even if you made or make repayment in full, the United States does not waive its right to pursue any applicable civil or criminal remedies.” Roger threw the letter on the coffee table, among the ash trays and Bud Light cans. Several times during the weekend, Anthony told me that he would leave the projects and get himself a nice little house, if only he could get “the right kind of assistance.” But, according to the letters he and Roger showed me, the Wells brothers owe various agencies a total of $15,379.36. Because of the Education Department debt, the I.R.S. kept the seven-hundred-dollar tax refund that Anthony had been expecting.

The brothers were starting to drive each other nuts. When they got me alone, each told me he was fed up with the other thinking that the world owes him a living. Both said they suffer from high blood pressure and anxiety. Anthony brought out some bottles of pills he’d recently been given at a free clinic: the antidepressants Citalopram and Trazodone. “I wake up hollering,” he said. “Just the other night I was dreaming I was in a place, L.A. or somewhere. Wasn’t New Orleans. And there were these people trying to kill me. These dudes got big Rottweilers, pit bulls. Roger and Trista had to come in and wake me up.”

“Yeah,” Roger said. “He was yelling, ‘Get them off me! Get them off me!’”

The New Yorker offers a signature blend of news, culture, and the arts. It has been published since February 21, 1925.